Gustaw Herling-Grudziński

Volcano and Miracle is a selection of fiction and prose writings from Gustaw Herling's masterwork, The Journal Written at Night. The Journal is an account of events and reflections that offer the occasion for this great writer to continue rethinking and reimagining the human condition. These remarkable selections from Gustaw Herling's Journal, written from 1970 to the present, include such astonishing fictional tales, based on historical sources, as "Rubble," "The Duke of Milan," "The Miracle," and "A Venetian Portrait," a love story that takes place at the end of World War II. But the heart of the Journal is brilliant critical pieces on Soviet Communism and literary gems on such writers as Ignazio Silone, Stendhal, Melville, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Camus.

Shaw is in Fiji to sell a stolen painting to the crime boss, Vornis. It will be the deal of a lifetime, if Shaw can pull it off. But then Vornis parades his latest toy around in front of him—a captured DEA agent whose time is running out. It’s none of Shaw’s business, and it doesn’t matter that under any other circumstances Lee would be exactly Shaw’s type: he’s young, he’s hot, and he might even have a personality if they hadn’t beaten it out of him. Too bad there’s no way Lee is getting off the island. Too bad there’s nothing Shaw can do for him. And too bad there are some lines that even Shaw won’t cross. Keeping his hands off Lee proves harder than he thinks, but Shaw’s not stupid enough to fall for the tortured captive of a dangerous crime boss, is he? If he did, it wouldn’t be just his job he would be risking—it would be his life.

"The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, contains thirteen stories spanning the last twenty years of his life." "In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa," Herling's critique of the Pope's abortion stance, raised the ire of the Catholic Church when it was first published; it describes the plight of a lovely young Polish woman, who, raped by Serbs, moves afterwards to a presbytery in Italy, and is pressured by the Church to keep her child. In "A Hot Breath in the Desert" the terrifying deterioration of the lives of a young archeologist couple, who settle down in the idyllic region of Lucania, is recounted by two old men with heart disease strolling the Naples waterfront."--BOOK JACKET.